Waymo Sues California DMV to Hide Autonomous Crash Data
Waymo takes legal action to prevent the release of its self-driving car crash reports, while a mental health nonprofit faces backlash for sharing crisis texts with an AI startup.
Waymo is suing the California Department of Motor Vehicles to block the public release of its autonomous vehicle crash data and other operational details. The Alphabet subsidiary argues that this sensitive information is a trade secret that could give competitors strategic insight into its technology and collision remediation strategies. The lawsuit follows a public records request for Waymo's permit application that challenged the company's attempts to redact the submitted documents.
In a separate controversy, the non-profit organization Crisis Text Line faces severe criticism for sharing mental health crisis text conversations with its commercial spinoff, Loris.ai. The data, which comes from vulnerable individuals seeking suicide prevention support, is stripped of personally identifiable information before being used to train customer service chatbots to be more empathetic. The close financial and leadership ties between the non-profit and the AI startup raise serious ethical questions about the practice.
Experts question whether the non-profit truly obtains meaningful and fully understood emotional consent from people in crisis to use their conversations for commercial AI training. Although stripping the data of personal identifiers makes the data sharing technically legal, the moral implications of monetizing mental health distress remain highly controversial. Both situations highlight ongoing tensions between corporate data privacy, public transparency, and the ethical use of sensitive information in the technology sector.